Remembering George Herbert, priest and poet

We were fresh from a tour of Salisbury Cathedral, whose very walls, windows, and arches chart the course of British Christendom from the clean lines of the Romanesque era to the glories of the High Gothic to the Victorian hubris that plastered hideous decorative silliness over the once-elegant simplicity of the architecture. After a disappointing view of Stonehenge, which we had to view from hundreds of feet away because the tourist traffic was tearing up the ground around the ancient stones, our attention was directed toward the unprepossessing little parish church of St. Andrew in the unprepossessing little parish of Bemerton, where poet George Herbert served as rector.

Years later, during a summer composers’ workshop in Prague, we were shown into a simple room in a little house on a quiet street, furnished with a fireplace and a writing desk, and whose windows looked directly out onto the pedestrian traffic. Here we were informed that “This is the room where Mozart wrote Don Giovanni.” We grad-school composers looked at each other, and one of us broke the silence by shouting, “BREATHE!”, whereupon we all began to fan the enchanted air toward our eager faces with our unhallowed hands.

I thought of the little church on Salisbury Plain wherein one of the greatest of the English “Metaphysical Poets” ministered, and wondered why we never even got off the bus for a closer look, let alone gulped in the very air in the rector’s study. Perhaps it was because my composer peers and I thought something could rub off on us by proximity to Mozart’s holy relics, and no one on our English tour bus cherished such hopes.

Born in 1593, George Herbert, a cousin of the Earl of Pembroke, grew up amongst gifted and creative people. His mother was a friend of John Donne, and many other poets and writers moved in her orbit. His brother Henry was an established poet. At Trinity College, Cambridge, George became Public Orator of the University, welcoming famous visitors with speeches in Latin, and writing letters of thanks (also in Latin) acknowledging gifts to the University Library. His labors caught the attention of King James I, who bestowed an annual allowance upon the young scholar, whom he appeared to have destined for an ambassadorship. But upon the death of James in 1625, George Herbert renewed his original intention of pursuing ordination over a life at court. He was ordained in 1626, and became rector of the parishes of Bemerton and Fugglestone. According to James Kiefer,

He served faithfully as a parish priest, diligently visiting his parishioners and bringing them the sacraments when they were ill, and food and clothing when they were in want. He read Morning and Evening Prayer daily in the church, encouraging the congregation to join him when possible, and ringing the church bell before each service so that those who could not come might hear it and pause in their work to join their prayers with his.

Shortly before his untimely death he sent his book of poems, The Temple, to his friend Nicholas Ferrar to publish if he thought them to be of value. Published after Herbert’s death, his poems influenced the work of other poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge notably among them. Several of them have been used as hymns, in particular “Teach me, my God and King,” and “Let all the world in every corner sing.“

He also wrote a book of instruction for parish clergy called A Priest to the Temple; or, The Country Parson. He died on 1 March 1633, but is commemorated two days earlier, to avoid conflict with other commemorations.

The Church of England has had an outsized portion of creative genius entrusted to it from the beginning, from the resonant prose of the prayerbook to the fantasy of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, from the glorious verse of Donne (Herbert’s godfather) to the music of Handel and Purcell and Byrd, Britten and Walton and Vaughan Williams. As we remember one of the greatest exponents of Anglican religious verse, let us pray for a reawakening of religious imagination in our own time—for new wineskins fit to hold the new ever-new wine of the Gospel.